Summary
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon feels like a pretty legitimately different installment in an all-too-familiar franchise, and the show’s title character remains as watchable as ever in his new surroundings.
This recap of the AMC series The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1 Episode 1, “L’ame Perdue” contains spoilers.
You’re probably wondering how we got here.
That applies in two ways to The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. How did we get here, our second spin-off from The Walking Dead, despite that show having made such a big deal about ending, just a couple of months after Dead City?
That’s an easy question to answer – it’s a major money spinner for AMC.
But there’s a more literal interpretation with Daryl Dixon, since the show is set in France, and the premiere episode, “L’ame Perdue” – or “The Lost Soul” in French – is deliberately coy about how Daryl washed up there. How exactly Daryl made it from the Commonwealth to the French coast is a mystery for now, one that’ll presumably unravel in the remaining five episodes.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1 Episode 1 Recap
Let’s start with the obvious: This isn’t just a show set in France. It legitimately feels very French. There are French actors everywhere, and they speak in their subtitled mother tongue often. It seems to have been shot on location, with some atypically stunning scenery to ogle. There’s even a snazzy convent full of medieval weaponry.
So, you know, it’s different. And that’s good. If there’s one thing this franchise needs, it’s something fresh. I didn’t think we’d get it with Daryl, the idealized laconic outdoorsman who named his dog Dog, but here we are.
How did Daryl get to France?
In typical franchise fashion, Daryl Dixon picks up in medias res, with Daryl washing ashore on a raft in the South of France. We have no idea how he got there. He later attributes the voyage to a string of bad decisions, and the closing scenes give us a few more pieces to put together, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
In essence, Daryl left the Commonwealth in search of Rick and Michonne, found some bad people and a boat, and one thing led to another.
These early scenes are intriguing in both their familiarity and their newness. Daryl finds a poncho in record time and enjoys some fish while listening to the last recorded words of a doomed Irish survivor, which is very on-brand, but then he starts hiking the countryside and finds a bunch of French graffiti, which is not.
Who are Maribelle and Guillaume?
The first people Daryl encounters are a woman, Maribelle, and a man named Guillaume she claims is her father. They seem nice enough, and Maribelle speaks decent English. But after Daryl helps them dispatch some militia types, they whack him over the head and rob him.
This is a minor scene in the grand scheme of things, mostly a way to introduce Daryl to his savior, the nun Isabelle, and get him positioned at her convent for more exposition, but I raise it here since Maribelle is clearly going to become a significant character. Guillaume, less so – he’s later killed when the soldiers find them on the road and want more information about Daryl.
Why is Laurent important?
Isabelle is a font of information. First, she explains that the abbey where Daryl has been patched up is part of The Union of Hope (Union de L’Espoir), a hodgepodge of different religious groups promoting tolerance in a world that has exclusively been defined by intolerance, which Daryl understandably scoffs at.
Second, she explains that Daryl’s wound, which the nuns cauterized, came from a “burner”, a fascinatingly unexplained type of local zombie that seems to have the same acid blood as the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise and earlier seared giant welts into Daryl’s arm when it grabbed hold of him.
She also, after a while, explains about Laurent, an orphaned boy raised in the convent who’s a Will Hunting-style mathematical boffin and is also, apparently, Jesus. Or close to Jesus, anyway.
The nuns believe – thanks largely to a sketch of a man Laurent drew three weeks prior and the claims of the group’s Buddhist monk leader – that Laurent is a messiah, and that Daryl is his prophesized protector, sent to shepherd him to a base up north where he can be made ready to rebuild humanity. He has already been tutored under Pére Jean, but he recently died and is being kept as a walker in a dungeon, since the nuns have certain beliefs about putting him out of his obvious misery.
Needless to say, Daryl and his adorable suspenders aren’t buying this for a minute, but he also needs a port and a vessel back to the U.S., and Isabelle is his best chance of getting those things. Plus, a rather fateful turn triggers Daryl’s heroic instincts and he decides to take on the mission.
What happens at the abbey?
That fateful turn is the arrival of the guerriers – a French word for warriors – who were tipped off by Maribelle that Daryl killed their men. Isabelle’s running a fairly widespread leafleting campaign, and one of her flyers was found near the corpse of the solder who turns out to have been the brother of the group’s leader, Codron, so the guerriers turn up at the abbey, force their way inside, and eventually start killing everyone, despite the nuns taking up medieval arms against them.
Naturally, Daryl, who left moments before this, returns in the nick of time to save Isabelle, Laurent, and another nun named Sylvie, and together they all set out to escort Laurent to safety and get Daryl to a boat.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1 Episode 1 Ending Explained
A scene at the end of the episode introduces what we must assume is the show’s Big Bad, as well as giving a few clues as to how Daryl ended up in France in the first place.
Aboard a ship docked in La Havre, a woman named Madame Genet is extremely unhappy with the captain and his crew, who fearfully explain to her that their prisoners have escaped and their experiments(!) have been ruined by a man named Dixon. He was thrown overboard, but his death wasn’t confirmed, so Genet sends out some men to make doubly sure.
This is all intriguing, no? Daryl leading a mutiny and breaking up some kind of illicit maritime experimentation seems tailor-made for a flashback episode, so look forward to that.
What did you think of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon Season 1 Episode 1, “L’ame Perdue”? Comment below.
